Having a website is a great tool that can be used for marketing and boosting up your audience. A website is like a machine that works constantly to the advantage of your construction business. This machine is responsible for building the brand of your business and bringing you new customers. Having an online presence can be crucial for the well-being of your business. The internet is running the world nowadays and the only way one can survive is by having an excellent website running the business.
But building up a website can seem like a very complicated task for you. This is true, especially if you don’t have any website designing experience. What you need to know is that there are plenty of tools out there that can make it way easier for you to successfully build and launch your website. I’d like to introduce you to the 10 website checklists before launching your construction website.
Before Launching Your Website
There are some things that you must know before you press that button and you start launching your website.
Choose A Professional Website Builder For Your Construction Company: Whether you know about HTML or not it doesn’t really matter. A professional builder is going to help you create the design of your website for having the site user-friendly and make sure that it suits the needs of your clients. Now, if you already have some HTML experience and you feel like you have the time needed to dedicate to the website then you can choose a builder that works on HTML and allows you to manually code your favorite elements.
But if you feel like you don’t have the time or the luxury to do manual, HTML coding, then a builder that allows you to drag and drop is optimal for you. This should take much of your time. Just define what your priorities are, have clear goals for your construction business and then you are ready to go. Make sure to choose a professional builder for the necessities of your construction website. Choose simple templates that don’t usually confuse the user as this is very important for ranking.
Pick a Good SEO Domain Name
Your domain name can decide whether your website is going to get a lot of visibility or not. Picking a good SEO domain name can mean a lot for the well-being of your construction business. Before you rush into making a decision, you should consult your team to see what is the aim of your company. What makes you stand out? What is it that the public is missing for the moment, that you feel like you can offer?
Answering these questions can be crucial in the decision for picking your domain name. This is because once the domain name is picked and bought, you cannot change it. So make sure that the domain you choose is good for SEO, ends with ‘.com’, (as users prefer domains that end with ‘.com’ over everything else and a domain name that resonates with the personality of your brand.
You can choose a domain from Google domains, or another host, or if the builder that you are using offers a hosting service then you can choose your domain through your builder. Check your domain’s availability and make sure that the name is the same on all of the social media accounts, to create more brand unity.
Choose An Excellent Hosting Provider
A hosting provider is like renting out an office from a real estate agency. As your construction business generates more clients and your revenue starts to increase further, your hosting provider can help you with different features.
There are plenty of domain registers or website builders who also provide hosting. It is best to have everything within the same company. Just make sure that they have a top-notch customer support team. Independently of the hosting service that you choose there are two main things that you should know:
Create XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a list of the single pages that make up your website. This is very important for indexing your website. The XML sitemap shows the URL of each and every page that is on your website, making the job easier for crawlers of Search Engines to rank up your website.
Setup SSL Certificate
Have you ever seen that a URL is in ‘HTTP’ format and others are ‘Https’ format? This is because the latter is an SSL certificate that makes sure that your users have a secure and encrypted connection between their browsers and your website. This way all the data of your users, such as passwords, credit card information, or other private data are safe.
Modern User-Friendly Website Design
Whether you are using HTML or pre-built templates for designing your website, you must know that this is a crucial step for the wellbeing of your website. Your construction website must be user-friendly in order to be successful.
Most of the things that you add to your construction website are added during the website design. When people visit your website for the first time they must be impressed with what they see. The website design must resonate with the brand identity of your construction business. You need to take care also of the different page elements that are needed to promote your business.
If you plan to blog on your site then you need a strategy on how you are going to place your posts. If you are planning to sell your services on your websites you should make people attracted to your product pages. Know that if your visitors have a hard time finding what they are looking for then your website might not rank that high on search engines.
SEO Optimization
Search Engine Optimization can greatly help your website get more visitors. Studying SEO can bring a significant amount of visitors to your website. Once your website is ranked up high then your construction business is going to have a better chance of succeeding.
But SEO is not as easy as it seems. Surely most people might think that by just putting some keywords in your articles, you must rank up on the first page, right? Wrong. The ranking is not only about keywords. It starts with researching the right keywords for the niche of your business. But then it goes further than that. It spreads in subheadings and paragraph sizes and more technical stuff that you can only learn through studying.
Did you know that 90 percent of people don’t go past the first page on the search results? And 30 percent of these people never go past the first three results. So you want to have your construction website rank up high. SEO is the perfect tool for this. And the great part is that you can learn SEO easily. There are many, many websites out there that provide free information on Search Engine Optimization. You just have to research.
Add Email Sign Up Function
How do you make sure that the random website visitors, turn into loyal fans and even clients? By adding email signup. Whether it is for a free newsletter or simply daily tips, an email sign up is crucial for your construction website. You can make a good strategy. You can create a free newsletter where you give your readers free tips about construction and you can send an update to them every week.
This way you are bringing value to them. By providing value to them, they will have a reason to stick around your website which is by definition going to increase your website’s dwell time. An email sign up also helps you boost up your email list. This way when you have a sales campaign you can email your loyal fans and wait for them to buy your services. Email sign up can significantly affect the revenue that you get from your website.
Test, Test, and Test Again
Before you even consider launching your website, you must make sure to test everything in this land of the internet. You only going to learn if your website has any flaws by doing frequent testings.
Open your website on different browsers and see how it looks like. See how your website loads, how fast it operates. Remember that users are going to use different browsers so you have to make sure that everyone’s satisfied.
Another kind of testing that you can do is to open your website on different devices. Some people prefer to use their laptops for navigating while others like to surf the net through their phones. Check and double-check all the links on your websites. There is nothing worse than an Error 404 page popping up. This can increasingly damage the reputation of your website, so make sure that everything is running smoothly.
Have Your Website on Google Analytics
You need to constantly check the performance of your website and the best way to do so is through tools such as Google Analytics. This is probably the best tool that website users use in order to check on the performance of their website.
Google Analytics can show you results on your audience’s demographics, age, preferences, and such. These data are really important because by studying them, you can learn how to aim your content in a better way.
You need to, learn what is currently working and what is not. This way you can cut short what is not working for the moment and focus only on tactics that are bringing you results. You can look at the future of your website beforehand with the help of Google Analytics. Just focus on having your construction website on it.
Perform Last Checks
You need to make sure that everything is absolutely perfect before launching your website. Your visitors need to see nothing but a site that speaks of professionalism. They cannot come across your construction website and see a broken image. Perform last checks before launching your website. Make sure that your articles are all polished and in order. Make sure that the links are working as well as the buttons you have added are clickable.
Don’t just rush into going live with your site as soon as possible and miss the most important things. Better check first to avoid looking unprofessional. I have seen many cases of people forgetting to delete the Latin dummy text, out of rushing to do everything so quickly. Better dedicating another day to it but at least you know that you have done everything possible to have your website optimized to its finest.
Market Your Website
At last but not least, have a perfect marketing strategy for your website, way before launching it. You don’t want to launch your site and then look randomly for a strategy to promote everything. Are you going to focus more on Google or Instagram Ads? Are you going to pay off other sites for mentioning you, or are you going to mention the first and then contact them sincerely and ask for a favor return?
You see, all of these are questions that you need to answer if you want your website to be successful. Your construction business is relying on these strategies. Let me tell you a little secret. You can have the best content in the world. Without a great marketing strategy, your content is going to sink in the world on a billion other websites.
Conclusion
So now you know the 10 basic things that you must consider before you launch your construction website. Don’t get carried away by the amount of work that needs to be done. You can do this. If other people have managed to get their websites on top of the internet world, so can you. Just pay a little bit of attention to the details and you will be fine, I promise you. Make sure to follow the tips that I have written above by heart and your construction website will thrive.